Only a Blockhead

Throw out the baby (Jesus) but keep the bathwater

In a recent Guardian book review, Richard Holloway considers Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. Holloway notes that the picture of the universe that science presents “leaves some of us with a kind of resonant absence” (what Buddhist philosopher David Loy terms “lack”).

 Spufford, feeling an existential need for forgiveness, decides that (Holloway’s summary), “Christianity, with its doctrine of unconditional acceptance, makes emotional sense.” He doesn’t know if there is a god, but sometimes “can feel that there is one. And so it makes emotional sense to proceed as if he’s there.”

 One reason for Spufford’s gut-feeling flight to religion seems to be modern atheism’s tendency, in Holloway’s words, “to bundle up all expressions of religion in the same ugly blanket before throwing it off a cliff.” Spufford’s wish for forgiveness can’t be denied, but does it have to lead to “he,” she, or a chorus line of elephants with pink toenails?

 No, says Alain de Botton in Religion for Atheists. de Botton poses the question--blindingly obvious once asked--of why humans invented religions in the first place. He answers,

we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.

 Taking many of his examples from Judaism and Christianity, de Botton shows how religion has skillfully scratched humanity’s itch for tenderness, kindness and forgiveness, while encouraging our better natures, through myth, ritual, prayer, architecture, art and education. He then—and this is the brilliance of the book--goes on suggest ways that we might satisfy these needs through often similar secular initiatives.

 de Botton thinks that current education is failing us by not teaching us how to live. He is one of the founders of The School of Life, a UK institution designed to fill that gap. Another founding faculty member, Roman Krznaric recently gave an interview in which he discusses the school.  

--Julian

Which Line Do You Take?

—David

Mortality

Coincidentally related to David's previous post

Our own inevitable death is unthinkable, so it’s a rare and bracing treat to be brought face to face with it. Doubly so when your guide is as insightful and witty as Christopher Hitchens. His posthumously published Mortality is a slight—about 100 pages of large print—but compelling memoir written as he faced and then slipped toward death, not raging—he’s too smart for that--but observing, and suffering appalling medically-induced pain in the hope of prolonging his own and others’ existence. The sadness when the book is over is for a great mind stilled. (OK, there was the Iraq glitch, but he went a long way toward making up for it by voluntarily undergoing waterboarding, an experience that returns unexpectedly in his last months.)

Sam McNerney, in a Big Think blog post, suggests why reading books like Mortality can be uplifting. It’s not only simple, selfish exhilaration at having dodged the bullet so far (Hitchens was born the same year as I was). Tragedy can call forth moral excellence, and Hitchens’ memoir embodies courage and altruism. We respond to that and, in McNerney’s words, “a tragic moment on the big screen or on the page makes us want to be better people.”

--Julian 

Reading Rorty Again

Something I'm working on has sent me back to Richard Rorty's brilliant Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, a book that changed the way I think about the world, and to which I return often, but not often enough.

The ability to see other human beings as "one of us" rather than as "them" is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like.  This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist's report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel.  Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright gives us the details of kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended.  Fiction like that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabakov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves.  That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have gradually, but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress."

Yes!

—David

David Ware, RIP

David Ware is dead.

 

That Ware's solo is, in the above clip, cut off in mid-flight is sadly appropriate.

—David

Oh, wow. The Moon!

—David

Leaving Work

—David

The Story of my Assassins

The Story of My Assassins, as ethical as it is entertaining, reminds us how humane, how necessary, realist fiction can be.

My review of Tarun J. Tejpal's most recent novel appears in today's Japan Times. Read the rest here.

—David